Heres The Rest Of Them!Right At The End Of This Month I Decided I Had Run Out Of Time, So The Real Life

Here’s the rest of them! Right at the end of this month I decided I had run out of time, so the real life sketchbook has a few pages painted flat black between these.

I feel a lot better this year, but I have a couple of strategies planned in case things go badly again. I might go as small as A7 if a whole page is too daunting, and in the limit if I really can’t do anything on a given day I’ll paint it black again. That way I won’t have a backlog - either it’s done or it’s not.

Inktober is may favourite art event of the year so I hope this time goes better!

Over Christmas the Sunday School children made some paper angels to decorate the church, and I thought it would be fun to try to interpret them literally.

The first one is based on small angels they made to decorate the cross, they had wings but no arms, and halos but no faces.

The middle two are based on a huge angel Gabriel, which was 5 massive pieces of black paper in a sort of windmill shape, covered in stars and googly eyes. He also had a halo with no face. I thought, best case scenario this is a human-shaped star field, worst case it’s a sort of hole in reality filled with eyes.

The final one was based on chatting to the parish priest about how angels are described in the Bible. There’s a lot of eyes and wheels involved.

I’d quite like to work these up into a series of paintings, I think? These were all done with crayola pencils on printer paper because I was at my parents’ house. I’d also like to try and animate the final one, in my mind it was spinning.

I did a one marker challenge! Well, one and a half markers; I did use a colourless blender. In hindsight I don’t think I needed to, the white space I left around Nettle is big enough that I could have done sharp purple shadows on her skin.

The purple marker didn’t layer as well as I hoped, it would only go a tiny bit darker with multiple coats, even when I waited for it to dry.

My blender ran out when I was trying to lighten the background. It’s a Copic Ciao so I ordered a refill, with only a small grimace at paying £7 for a bottle of clear ink.

I made a Redbubble shop!

Lately I've been wanting to make some non-postcard products like stickers and things, so I set up a little shop on Redbubble. Now I can try all sorts of things! To start with I've just picked a handful of my recent pieces and set up basics like prints and stickers, but please do make a request if there's something you want. The possibilities are vast, they have so many products.

I'm pretty excited about the spiral notebooks, maybe I'll be a horrendous narcissist and buy notebooks with my own art on them.

I had 10 days off work for Easter, but of course we’re still trapped indoors, so I decided to do some gouache painting! I’ve only used gouache once before, but I’m pretty pleased with these. I suppose it’s not very different from watercolour which is what I normally use. Next I may dare to try… acrylics.

These are landscapes from Shasta’s world. One day I’m going to have to make a decision on whether I like the pylons or the stone ruins better, since pylons would rust away very quickly. Maybe I can contrive a reason for them to survive…

This is probably my most popular non-fanart piece ever, so I added it to my redbubble shop! I’ve just set up basics like prints and postcards, but I can add other products if anyone is interested.

I’m just in it for the spiral notebooks really.

Day 2 - gel pens (and a brush pen)

More creatures than Louise and her foster parents call her house their home.

Remember when I said I only had 90 minutes a day to do these? I don’t know what made me think I could do this in an hour and half. It took that long to do just the lineart and the spot blacks, I’ve been crosshatching for hours! I’m really pleased with this though, so it was worth it.